Review: Parrot Airborne Cargo Drone & Airbone Night Drone
Today, I have two more new drones from Parrot. 
Meet the Airborne Cargo Drone on the left, and the Airborne Night Drone on the right. What’s the difference between the two? Here’s a quick rundown. The Airborne Night Drone is built to fly during the day and night thanks to two powerful LED lights with adjustable intensity. However the Airborne Cargo Drones is able to carry figurines or toy “bricks” meaning the Lego building blocks that kids play with:
The drones are powered by small lithium polymer batteries that last about 10 minutes. Batteries charge in 25 minutes if you get the 2.6A charger. You can also get extra batteries cheaply. You connect to the drones via Bluetooth 4.0 LE and you fly them via the FreeFlight 3 app for Android or iOS. When I tried them out, I took me a while to get a handle on flying them. But after about 30 minutes, I got a hang of flying them without crashing them.
There’s a VGA quality camera at the bottom of the drone that allows you to snap pictures of what you’re flying over. Here’s an example:
The quality is decent. But it doesn’t broadcast live video. Thus you have to take your best guess as to if your subject is properly framed in the lens. The drone has 1GB of memory and you can either pull the photos onto your phone over the air, or by connecting the drone to your computer via USB and dragging them off. Speaking of connecting the drone via USB, that’s also the best way of updating the drones firmware as doing it over the air can take hours and you cannot use the drone if the firmware isn’t up to date as far as FreeFlight 3 is concerned.
The Airborne Night Drone sells for $159 CDN and The Airborne Cargo Drone sells for $129 CDN. These drones are a great choice for someone who wants to have fun with an airborne drone at a very low cost.
December 26, 2015 at 5:46 pm
how do i update the firmware for the Airborne Night drone? I’m having the hardest time
December 27, 2015 at 8:55 pm
What I did was to follow the instructions here:
http://www.parrot.com/usa/support/parrot-airborne-cargo-drone/
Click on “With A USB Cable” and follow the instructions to the letter.
March 24, 2016 at 9:28 pm
This so FRUSTRATING… there are no instructions on how to update the drone firmware using USB. The User Guide on their website has nothing in it about this ???? How the heck do you update the firmware on the Parrot Drone ???
March 24, 2016 at 9:34 pm
Stupid thing is the instructions are not in the User Guide. They are on their download page.
Here are the instructions if someone else is looking for them.
Install the battery in the MiniDrone and wait until the lights turn green.
Connect the MiniDrone to your computer using a USB/micro-USB cable.
> Wait until the left-hand light is a steady green.
Download the update file available in the box above this procedure. Do not rename the downloaded file.
Drag and drop the update file into the MiniDrone as though it were a USB Flash drive. The update file must be placed at the root of the MiniDrone and not in a folder.
> The lights flash while the update file is being transferred.
> Once the transfer is complete the right-hand light remains orange.
Safely remove and disconnect the MiniDrone from your computer.
> The update is installed. The lights alternately flash orange with increasing rapidity. Do not remove the battery from the MiniDrone while the update installation is in progress.
Wait until the lights turn green.